Performance analysis of MIMO — OFDM downlink with soft and hard decision decoding for 1/2 and 1/4 rate convolution encoder

The main objective of reliable radio packet data access is providing efficient data rates with minimum bandwidth requirement with low bit error rate(BER). To achieve all these requirements there is need to study characteristics of channel like ability to with stand for the errors. This paper analyses bit error rate(BER), by arbitrarily assuming AWGN channel with OFDM-MIMO (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing multiple inputs and multiple outputs) based transmission. Block errors was analyzed produced by channel for various SNR (signal to noise ratio) levels by implementing viterbi decoder with hard decision decoding (HDD) and soft decision decoding (SDD) for different code rates. This paper compares the decoding mechanism and best suited code rate for convolution encoder, based on their abilities to overcome Fading incurred in channel. This paper demonstrated that SDD is efficient compared to HDD and 1/4 rate is more advantage for convolution encoder than 1/2 rate.